29 March 2015 12:40 AM

This has been a week of memorable fakery. A Muslim Tory parliamentary candidate was caught colluding with ultra-nationalists to try to look good. The Government hatched a sneaky and dishonourable plot to destroy the Speaker, for daring to stand up to them.

So it seems to me to be worth asking if David Cameron and Alex Salmond are secretly working together.

The Tories claim to be outraged that the Scottish Nationalists say they will deny them a majority. Why? They have no divine right to rule.

Isn’t all this shouting too loud to be true? And the SNP’s voters, who can’t stand the Tories, would never forgive their leaders if they propped up a Cameron government.

The SNP is under no obligation to help the Tories into office, though you might get that impression from the toady Blairite media who have adopted David Cameron, the self-proclaimed heir to Blair, as their last best hope.

This, by the way, explains why Islington lefties and the BBC are so fervently backing David Cameron against Ed Miliband – and is one of the reasons why I am seriously thinking of registering to vote for the first time in 30 years, and casting my ballot for Labour.

The fashionable Left’s loathing of Mr Miliband, and the incessant spiteful bullying and belittling of this man by much of my trade, make me want to stand up for him against this nasty mob, even though I disagree with him about almost everything.

At least I actually know what the Labour leader’s true opinions are. This is more than can be said for Mr Cameron, whose real aims are harder to grasp than a lavishly greased piglet.

So you see how the world’s turning upside down. Nothing’s what it seems in this Election. For instance, I think the SNP actually want the Tories to dominate the next government.

That’s why they are so helpfully playing this game in which Labour are damaged by being portrayed as Alex Salmond’s prisoners. If Scotland leaves the UK, Tory hopes of power grow, and Labour’s hopes dwindle.

Though nobody in the Tory high command will openly say this, the Conservative Party knows that its only hope of ever again commanding a Westminster majority and governing alone lies in a Scottish exit from the UK.

Nobody will ever be able to say for certain if the Government’s woeful mishandling of the Scottish issue was deliberate sabotage of the UK or mere incompetence. My own guess is that it was bungled ‘accidentally on purpose’, as we used to say in my childhood. What is certain is that it has brought Scotland closer to departure than anyone could possibly have imagined five years back.

And that one of the many unpleasant shocks waiting for us on the far side of this Election will be the break-up of our country, brought about with many crocodile tears, by the very party that pretends to stand for the Union.

If 'bogey man' Ed did this, we'd all be very sniffy...

Have you ever wondered what happened to the vegetables so wantonly sacrificed in the BBC’s carefully stage-managed TV advertisement for David Cameron?

Keen-eyed viewers will have noted the Prime Minister twice giving his nose a jolly good wipe with the back of his hand, as he chopped away at his groceries. Just imagine what would have happened to Ed Miliband if he’d done that: action replays and front-page pictures for days.

But Ed is a target, and Dave isn’t.

So I very much hope that the poor vegetables, so unhygienically treated, ended in the slop bucket, rather than being fed to the Camerons’ innocent children.

But there were other vegetables present. What did the BBC reporter, James Landale, think he was doing, joining in this shameless performance by subserviently tending to a lettuce? He might as well have knelt and done up Mr Cameron’s shoes for him, or some other fagging duty.

If Tory High Command want to make a TV commercial for their leader, in which he pretends to be the normal bloke he most certainly is not (normal people don’t become Prime Ministers, trust me) , then good luck to them. But the BBC should play no part in such fictions.

The kitchen in which they stood was not a normal kitchen in a normal home. Leave aside the armed guards outside. Can we doubt that every action was choreographed, and that every object in it was carefully placed to promote an image? What’s more, you and I pretty much paid for it.

For nearly eight years, in a piece of cheek still widely unknown to the public, the far-from-poor Camerons claimed £1,700 a month, tax-free, in Parliamentary expenses to pay the mortgage interest on this, their Oxfordshire village home.

This made Mr Cameron (who had another home only 70 miles away) one of the highest claimers of housing expenses in Parliament. While it’s good to see inside the house the taxpayer provided, at last, mightn’t a question on this subject have been in order, under the circumstances? Instead the First Lord of the Treasury was asked if it was a handicap to be posh.

Meanwhile, over on the equally impartial Channel 4 and Sky, Jeremy Paxman got clean away with asking Ed Miliband the insulting and patronising question: ‘Are you all right, Ed?’

I was pleased to see that Mr Miliband gave as good as he got. But is this what politics has come to? It seems so.

The loopy logic of losing an hour

In the small hours of this morning, this country went through the mad annual ritual of moving the clocks forward. For me (and I suspect many others), this means many weeks of something rather like jet-lag, only without the journey.

There’s very little hard evidence (if any) that this performance does any good at all. We do it out of inertia, and, if we’re not careful, EU zealots will soon force us to get up even earlier by lining us up with Berlin time. They never give up.

Much like man-made global warming, the strange cultish belief in falsifying the time was spread by fanatics.

An annoying businessman called William Willett was cross that it didn’t stay light long enough in the evening for him to finish his golf game, and also peeved that other people slept in on sunny mornings.

So he resolved to force us all to change our lives to suit people like him. The First World War – wars are always a good moment for crazed ideas to be implemented in a rush – gave him the chance. As with so many other daft things, we have been doing it so long that nobody ever even thinks about them.

The Germanwings crash

For some time now I have been urging an independent inquiry into the correlation between the use of ‘antidepressants’, suicide and (less often) mass killing.

This is not because I know if there is a connection, but because there have been so many episodes suggesting one that an investigation seems to be to necessary.

Now I learn that pilot Andreas Lubitz, who apparently deliberately crashed a plane killing all aboard, had received ‘treatment’ for a ‘serious depressive episode’. Once again, oughtn’t we at least to look?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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23 March 2015 12:56 PM

Which UK party do the Scottish Nationalists most want to do well in the coming election? Might they prefer the Tories? And might the Tories, deep down, also prefer a Scottish exit from the UK to the continuing Union they claim to support? Is this the love that dare not speak its name?

Since their narrow failure to win the independence vote in September, the Nationalists have been in a very interesting position. I take the view that Gordon Brown’s intervention, in the last days of the campaign, swung the result for 'No'. But the implied promise, that by staying in the Union, Scotland would even so be given almost everything short of actual independence, has led to the moral destruction of that Union. There's no doubt a vote now would go for separation.

I do not know if London’s politicians could ever have made enough concessions, swiftly enough, to satisfy Scots that they were sincere about the Brown pledge. But I am sure that David Cameron’s attempt to use the pledge to outmanoeuvre the Labour Party disgusted and disillusioned many of those who until then had been prepared to give the Union a chance. Any hope that the Union could survive in the long term (as long as we remain under EU sovereignty, anyway) died at that point.

Loyalist Tories (blinded to all other facts by their ridiculous refusal to grasp that their party is finished and ought to be) still have only the vaguest idea of the hatred for the Tory Party which exists in the North of England. Likewise they can barely conceive of the even greater loathing of the Tory Party which flourishes in Scotland itself. It is visceral, and not open to discussion.

Whether Mr Cameron , whom I regard as a thorough cynic, shares this blindness, I do not know. Somehow, I fear I will never get the chance to let him unburden his inner heart to me. My request for an interview with him still moulders in a drawer somewhere, long ago yellowed by time.

But, were I a cynical Tory strategist, in possession of the private polling such people see (whose results are easy to guess at) , I would be doing all in my power to manoeuvre Scotland into leaving the UK. I would never say so, because the remaining believers in my party would be outraged at such a betrayal of the Unionist principle. But I would carefully calculate my actions to achieve this end, without ever actually making it so obvious that it couldn’t be denied. The feebleness of Mr Cameron’s arguments for the Union before the referendum, his bad tactics in dealing with Mr Salmond, his post-referendum manoeuvres, can all be explained by incompetence or lassitude, and might actually have been caused by these things.

There’s no shortage of bunglers in the Tory machine, and Mr Cameron is not actually an especially clever politician. Remember, this is the man who nearly split his party, quite needlessly, over grammar schools, who has twice reversed himself over Green policies, who did split it over same-sex marriage, who bungled the Juncker affair, who has twice reversed himself over green policies, who destroyed Libya, who embarrassed the Queen by claiming childishly to a foreign politician that she had been ‘purring’ over the referendum result, and who hired Andrew Coulson as a Downing Street aide against the strong advice of many.

Even so, it is wise to remember that political cynics, competent or incompetent, are distinguished by the fact that they do not have any principles. That is how they get on. Charles de Gaulle managed to fool French conservatives into thinking he would hang on to Algeria, while all along intending to pull out. He told them ‘I have understood you’ , and they thought he meant ‘I agree with you’, because that was what they wanted to think. Thus he came to power.

The Tory party’s best hope of a getting a Westminster majority again is to get rid of Scotland. A UK shorn of Scotland would produce a Tory majority Parliament and so at least temporarily halt the slow but accelerating death of the Tory Party. But time is short. The core Tory vote is (literally) dying in droves as it is composed almost entirely of older voters. It is not being replaced. And as the new mass migrants become UK citizens, they are unlikely to become Tory voters. The break must happen soon if the Tory party is to regain its lost ability to govern with an absolute majority, and all the fundraising and other advantages that come with that status.

The SNP are aware of this. They play heavily on the Scottish hatred of the Tory party, and one of their most effective arguments during the referendum was to say that, if Scotland voted for independence it would never have another Tory government. Continued Tory dominance South of the Border would work for them in the post-election period , when they will work furiously to reopen the question of independence while the votes are running so strongly their way. By contrast, a Labour-dominated government in London would weaken their cause – not least Labour currently has absolutely no reason to want a Scottish exit from the Union. It still hopes to regain at least some of the votes and seats it is currently losing to the SNP. It is also quite willing to have some sort of informal arrangement with the SNP to hold power at Westminster, a deal the Tories cannot do without looking as unprincipled as they actually are. There's another aspect of this. The chances of a Labour majority government are now virtually nil, thanks to the SNP surge, so undermining the Tory 'Vote UKIP, get Red Ed' bogeyman campaign. The Tory campaign needs to re-engineer its bogeyman.

This brings me to various stories in this morning’s newspapers, recounting interviews given by the SNP ex-leader Alex Salmond, over the influence his party might hold if Labour forms a government in May.

The Daily Telegraph said that words spoken by Alex Salmond, the SNP’s ex-leader led to ‘accusations that he would "hold Ed Miliband to ransom" ‘. I could not find, in the story beneath, who exactly had spoken these words, which also appeared in connection with the story in a number of other newspapers. But there was no doubt that the words actually spoken were not helpful to Labour, which is frantically trying to play down the Scottish threat, and to avoid committing itself to any kind of deal with the SNP. The impression was given that Labour is the SNP’s patsy and puppet. Is it that straightforward?

What if the Tories and the SNP both ended up helping each other to get what they wanted – a Tory majority government at Westminster, and Scotland gone from the UK? A phrase from my childhood - 'accidentally on purpose' - springs to mind.

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22 September 2014 3:30 PM

For many years now it’s been thought clever to go on about the ‘West Lothian’ question when the issue of Scottish devolution is discussed. First asked by Enoch Powell and Tam Dalyell (both clever men, both dedicated troublemakers), it boils down to:

‘How can Scottish MPs at Westminster vote on purely English issues when MPs from England have lost their powers to take decisions about parallel Scottish matters?’

I used to be entranced by this clever-clogs stuff, and I can still see some strength in it. But I have been forced into a rethink by David Cameron’s decision to pretend he is under pressure on this from his backbenchers (whom he royally ignores when it suits him, on every subject there is).

He’s plainly playing a little game of ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’. Having come within inches of saying goodbye to the Scottish contingent of Labour MPs, thanks to the near-success of the campaign for Scottish independence, he has taken a strong liking to the idea. And, despite the referendum result, he wants to find a way of getting rid of the Scots anyway.

For, as we all know, he has no chance of a Westminster majority as long as there is a Scottish contingent there.

So, let’s make a matter of party advantage into a matter of principle. But is it actually? If it is, it’s funny that it’s been allowed to lie untended on the shelf for so many long decades. And which principle is it? Let us turn to the wisdom of Edmund Burke, whose 1774 address to the voters of Bristol (read it here http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch13s7.html ) is thought by many to be the last word on the proper role of an MP.

His constituents wanted Burke to be a kind of delegate from Bristol, representing the interests of Bristol in the national Parliament. Burke, in my view quite rightly, thought them mistaken. He believed that he was above all a member of the national legislature, sent there from Bristol, to use his own judgement and good sense as long as he was their MP. He was bound to listen to them, but not to take their advice. If they didn’t like the way he spoke and voted they could get rid of him, but he was not simply their mouthpiece.

The crucial passage runs thus : ‘Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament. If the local constituent should have an interest, or should form an hasty opinion, evidently opposite to the real good of the rest of the community, the member for that place ought to be as far, as any other, from any endeavour to give it effect.’

So, for instance, say an MP from Scotland is ( for example) a distinguished historian of Russia, an economist with a reputation for wise prediction, a former Army staff officer, a sometime steelworker, fisherman or train driver, or an experienced mother of children. Will he or she be excluded from any vote on English matters, because he or she is Scottish, even if his or her area of expertise and knowledge is under discussion and being voted upon? Will he or she be allowed to speak, but forbidden to vote? Will he or she be excluded from major ministerial office, because too many of that ministry’s decisions concern England alone?

If not, then where will the line be drawn? Any MP, wherever he or she is from, is fundamentally qualified by the fact that he or she has been chosen by electors to go to Parliament and be a member of it. He or she can surely listen with attention to debate, and have his or her mind changed? The real scandal here is not that Scottish MPs vote on English laws, but that the brute power of the whips often compels MPs of all parties and from all parts of the country to vote against their own personal desires and wisdom. That is something I would very gladly see reformed.

I might add, will the same rule be applied with equal rigour to MPs from Northern Ireland, which is pretty thoroughly devolved?

And what about the European ‘Parliament’? Since the EU still devolves a few powers to us here in the UK, should Euro-MPs from the UK be debarred from voting on matters that affect any of the other EU member countries? And should they be debarred from voting on our business? And how would we define what was our business.

I’d be happy, in a mischievous sort of way, with anything that gummed up the works of that horrible body.

But it seems to me that if the rule is ‘You can’t vote on matters in other parts of the federation, if your part of the federation has substantial devolved powers’ , then it could turn out to be quite explosive.

Put simply, it means that we no longer have a UK Parliament, just a place where all the UK MPs have offices, and are entitled to be, but are increasingly excluded from having anything to do with anything outside their own provinces.

That looks to me like a dissolution of the Union, in everything but name. Perhaps that is what we want. For me, I’m content to let Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have significant amounts of self-government if it makes them happy. I have absolutely no desire for an ‘English Parliament’ mainly because we have had such a body since 1265 or so, and it still exists, only with additional members from other parts of the country.

The other reason for not wanting such a thing is much like my reason for not wanting a written constitution. Who will design it?

I don’t just mean that the building will be a ghastly modernistic shed in Milton Keynes, designed by one of those New Labour architects who have done quite enough damage already. I mean that it will be elected according to some rigged system of proportional representation, probably based upon the infernal ‘regions’ which the EU is determined to impose upon us sooner or later.

As for our existing form of government, Scotland and Wales are entitled to some special measure of self-rule because England utterly dominates the UK, in terms of population, tax-base and usable land. Weren’t you shocked by how few people voted in the Scottish referendum (I don’t mean the excellent high turnout, but the actual totals)? There are English counties with more people in them than voted for Scottish independence.

Northern Ireland, by contrast, oughtn’t to have such a body, as direct rule from London is the only way of overcoming sectarianism. Some other form of strengthened local power might be designed, but not one that allows either community to lord it over the other, or which allows terrorist gangs significant influence over government and law. Certainly it should be spared somehow from copying mainland Britain’s comprehensive school disaster, but I suppose for that to happen there’d have to be an official recognition that it is a disaster, which some people amazingly still refuse to admit.

But I digress. That point, that the outlying parts of the UK are so small in population by comparison with England, is crucial to understanding why the West Lothian question is silly as well as clever. England dominates the others simply by existing, much as Germany dominates the continent. It can afford to subsidize its neighbours, and give them a large measure of home rule, and is wise to do so if it doesn’t want foreign powers meddling in our island, slipping in through an unguarded back door. It doesn’t need any special protection or privileges.

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21 September 2014 8:45 AM

The following is a slightly longer version of an article pubished in today's Mail on Sunday:

Unlike most Englishmen , I am lucky enough to have lived in Scotland. Better still, I did so as a small and impressionable child who has ever afterwards been comforted and reassured by Scottish voices, and moved by Scottish landscapes.

I love the seriousness of the place. You can keep your Golden Gate and your Sydney Harbour Bridge – no prospect gives a more powerful demonstration of man’s heroic triumph over gravity than the original Forth Bridge, and the setting - stern and wild - is matchless. Though, like many such imperial prospects, it would look even better with a few huge grey warships nearby.

I wept when I left – for an England I didn’t know at all - on a steam-hauled southbound sleeper, and still remember looking longingly from the train through the flashing diagonals of the great bridge, wishing I wasn’t going.

To this day I’m thrilled whenever I return. I love the exhilarating difference between us and them, and have enjoyed most of the growing assertion of Scottishness in recent years – though I can manage without Gaelic signs on railway stations, which I suspect are as baffling to most Scots as they are to me.

So I could never really join in what I saw as a shallow English resentment at the Scottish aspiration for independence. The Scots are a people, Scotland is a country, and the demand for self-rule is reasonable. We wasted many years, and made enemies out of friends, by refusing Home Rule to Ireland. Why make the same mistake again?

I couldn’t be romantic about it because I understand – as most in Britain do not – that there is no true independence for any territory ruled by the EU. But I could see why Scots got cross when they were told separation from England would make them poorer. So what? The power to rule yourself is priceless. Isn’t our history full of people who put liberty above money?

So I set out for my old home in Rosyth, and my favourite place in Scotland, the lovely ancient capital in Dunfermline, in two minds.

I didn’t fit neatly into anyone’s preconceptions, and nor did the Scots I spoke to. It was easy to fall into conversation with people, easier than it would have been in England. Once I promised anonymity, they were very happy to chat.

There was the quietly humorous shopkeeper who gave me a quick run-down on Dunfermline’s modern political geography – still very much a matter of Catholic and Protestant, whatever anyone may tell you. It wasn’t all that different from what you might have heard in Armagh City in Northern Ireland.

He was keener on the Union than I was, one of the lost legion who once made the Tory Party the biggest political force in Scotland, most of them now well over 50. They are not making them like that any more, and when they are gone the ‘yes’ vote will be far more powerful.

His Scotland was the country I remembered, the smell of coal smoke on the sharp winds, the mines and heavy industry, the blackened, austere stone buildings and the thin-faced serious people educated in stern and rigorous schools.

That’s all gone. The schools these days are as soppy and comprehensive as ours, and outside one of them – being used as a referendum polling station - I encountered another feature of the new Scotland. I was chatting to a teller from the ‘No’ campaign when we were approached by a man who could barely speak English and who looked to me as if he might well be Burmese.

Touchingly, he had no idea how to vote, and wanted to have it explained to him. We sent him inside for official advice, but I had two sharp opposite thoughts. The first was a sort of joy at a fellow-creature having his first taste of democracy; the other was to wonder why such a person should have more power than I did to change the face of my country.

The next person I met was a cheerful citizen who had decided that very morning to vote ‘Yes’. It was a pure gamble on his part, a gesture of revolt against a life that hadn’t offered him much, and now offered him even less – he hated above all the absence of any work except on miserable wages.

Independence (as I think he knew perfectly well) wouldn’t change that one bit. He just wanted to show he was alive, and relished the power to hurt those who had done nothing for him.

Then I took the train to Cowdenbeath, once a coalmining town, deep in Gordon Brown territory, its wonderfully bleak name best known from the weekly recitation of the football results.

Now it’s a town of people who used to work, their occupations gone – though it has somehow managed to acquire a sizeable Polish population and even a small Turkish community.

You could see what a cheerful, close-knit place it must have been in the days when the men all worked, the mixed curse of de-industrialisation which has left so many people with clean air, less danger and dirt, and more leisure than they know what to do with.

A magnificent, upright old lady with an umbrella, walking stoutly to the polls through the drizzle, filled me with guilt by denouncing , in beautiful, grammatical and clearly enunciated English, the silly delusions of the ‘Yes’ campaign, who were promising to spend money they hadn’t got on things they couldn’t afford. She wouldn’t say how she was voting –like a lot of ‘No’voters – partly because she had been brought up to believe in the secret ballot. But it wasn’t hard to guess.

Yet the young woman with the two children, one in a pushchair, made an equally moving case for ‘Yes’, deserted by her husband, stricken early in life with cancer, anxious to work but compelled to travel miles to do so, she truly believed that an independent Scotland would treat her better than the decayed and patchy welfare state she now relied on.

Plunging into a chemist for some headache pills, I noticed that by far the biggest part of the shop’s business was prescriptions, the little bags and envelopes piled up in their hundreds waiting for collection.

Back in Dunfermline, a woman from England – who had moved to Scotland because she liked it so much – told me a worrying story about a neighbour who had tried to put a ‘Yes’ poster on their shared lawn. When she had asked him politely not to, he unleashed a torrent of filthy insults, so menacing that she called the police (who to their credit came quickly and put him in his place).

Yet a few miles down the road a young mother complained to me about a ‘Yes’ canvasser who had ludicrously told her a ‘No’ vote would leave Scotland undefended from the terrorists of the Islamic State, who could then come and cut her head off. It wasn’t clear what would bring the Islamists to Fife at all.

By this time I was back in my old home town of Rosyth, where there are still 1940s Naval married quarters (including the one where I lived, instantly recognisable after nearly 60 years) amid the modern housing.

The Rosyth dockyard, built to calm an Edwardian panic about the German naval threat, is a solid symbol of the Union, overshadowed by the enormous crane used to build the giant new ‘Queen Elizabeth’ class aircraft carriers. It is also a solid symbol of the present day.

The carriers will have no aircraft for years, and look increasingly like seagoing white elephants. The yard is a sort of mortuary for the decommissioned Polaris submarines from the Cold War which nobody really knows what to do with. And it has of course been privatised.

I found plenty of obvious ‘No’ voters at Rosyth’s polling stations, some of them clearly English and linked with the dockyard. But the surprising thing was the number of ‘Yes’ supporters in a place so heavily dependent on the Ministry of Defence.

The following day, this being reserved Fife rather than rebellious Glasgow, there was little desire to over the battle again. I got the impression from the disappointed ‘Yes’ voters I spoke to that they do not think that the issue is closed, and believe that – perhaps ten years hence – their day will come.

English politicians, toying with fudging the promises they made in the last days of the campaign, should beware. From all my conversations, I am fairly sure that Gordon Brown’s intervention swung many thousands of Labour votes from ‘Yes’ to ‘No’. Mr brown and those voters will punish us terribly if they think we have bilked them.

One disappointed supporter of independence was plainly sick of being characterized as some sort of mindless anti-English bigot. He took me aside and said very seriously ‘Please tell your readers this. I am not voting “Yes” because I am anti-English. You would be utterly wrong to think that this is what motivates me or most of us.’ He was not the only one to say to me that it seemed to him that most English people know very little about Scotland and its people.

I think this battle will be fought again (most Scottish battles are). But need we be so sad and bitter if it is, and if it goes the other way (as I suspect it will)?

One young couple, he a determined ‘Yes’, she a severe ‘No’, gave a little hope to all of us. They disagreed utterly on the best future for Scotland, but with laughter rather than venom, and went off happily holding hands into the windy dusk.

Why ever not? Nobody was suggesting that we went to war with each other. I never saw why we in England should make such a fierce business of this, saying that a ‘Yes’ would be forever.

Ours is a willing Union, not a forced marriage, like those that imprison Flanders in Belgium, and Catalonia in Spain. The door is not locked against those who would leave. Why then should it be locked against them returning?

Alex Salmond asked, powerfully, ‘If not now, when?’, and I think the answer may well be ‘Ten years hence, when the older generation is gone’.

If the Scots want to go, as they may well, then I think we should make it clear that they would always be welcome back, and leave a light burning in the window. We will never have better friends, and you don’t keep friends by threatening them.

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Defeats are easy to understand. Victories can take decades to reveal their meaning.

The triumph over Soviet Communism in 1989 faded pretty quickly. The Kremlin menace – easily resisted by resolve and deterrence – was gone.

But in its place were subtler threats from Berlin and Brussels, the unwanted revolution of mass immigration from the old Soviet Empire, the sinister rise of China and the deep, menacing clouds of Islamic militancy.

So I see the Scottish referendum as the start of something, not the end.

Alex Salmond never wanted to have his vote so soon. If it hadn’t been for the solid old-fashioned common sense of the over-60s, he would have won on Thursday night.

In any case, he has won in many important ways. The Westminster panic in the last week was a huge victory for the SNP.

The pledge of maximum devolution was a giant retreat. David Cameron refused to have this option on the ballot paper at the start of the campaign.

Fearing he would lose all, including his own job, he conceded it after the voting had actually begun (so proving that it was done out of frenzied fear, not a long-term plan)

It will now be redeemed right down to the last inch of power and the last penny of cash.

And so what was left of the United Kingdom – which is not that much – will be even more threadbare than before.

The old magic of shared flags, shared wars and shared adversity looks pretty thin after this ruthless examination of the leases, bank accounts and family secrets which actually hold us together.

The general feebleness of the ‘No’ campaign was not the fault of those who ran it. They just didn’t have much to say. They haven’t really believed in the Union for years.

Much of what they said was arrant rubbish. There is no such thing as a ‘British passport’. They would be illegal under EU law.

The same establishment which urged Eternal Union on the Scots urged the opposite on the Protestants of Northern Ireland in the shameful, dishonest surrender referendum of 1998, whose bitter implications few in mainland Britain will admit.

And – in the key betrayal of all – that establishment supported the end of our Protestant, independent, offshore Union in the Common Market referendum of 1975. Now what are we to do?

Well, I urge you all to be extremely suspicious of any attempts to offer the people of England ‘devolved’ regions, which are designed to Balkanise England and make her more easily swallowed into the EU.

Such things are the opposite of what we need – the return of our lost power to make our own laws and govern our own borders.

It was exactly that aim which many Scots quite reasonably sought – which is why part of my sympathies will always lie with them in this cause.

I wish we in England had one tenth of their spirit and determination.

Let Putin enjoy his Ukraine victory

Last week the ‘West’ was roundly beaten by Vladimir Putin in the First Ukrainian War. The EU not only delayed a crucial part of its imperial deal with Kiev. It openly admitted that this was a concession to Moscow.

The resulting compromise could have been had last winter, before the EU and Washington mounted their violent mob putsch against the elected President of Ukraine, ludicrously claiming they did this in the name of democracy and good government. All the thousands of lives lost since that putsch were needlessly sacrificed. There is no magic formula which says that Ukraine, under Western domination, will cease to be grossly corrupt, lawless, bankrupt and unfree.

Russia has shown quite clearly that it means what it has patiently said for years, and will fight against any further Western expansion of the EU.

Yet intelligent friends of mine, influential among policy-makers, are urging that we refuse to accept this verdict, and prepare for another, similar conflict a few years from now by arming and training Ukraine’s feeble armed forces. Why? How is this in Britain’s interest, or the interest of the human race in general?

Our history is more than cigarettes and miniskirts

Sheridan Smith is astonishingly good as the young Cilla Black in ITV’s Cilla. But as always in recreating the past, this programme can’t quite face the truth. They don’t mind dwelling on the old religious divide, largely gone. But was 1960s Liverpool really as racially tolerant as shown? Old cars, old clothes and lots of smoking aren’t enough to recreate the day before yesterday, the trickiest bit of history.

The war against the machines

How I sympathise with the 76-year-old woman who, driven to rage by the needless complexity of her new mobile phone, lost her patience and swore at the device. How I also sympathise with her horror and amazement when the thing replied in a voice of maddening electronic calm: ‘Have I done something wrong?’ She was alone in the house at the time, late at night. Her daughter says she has yet to recover. I’m not surprised.

Gordon's predictable rehabilitation

I long ago predicted last week’s rehabilitation of Gordon Brown, similar to what happened to John Major. It was just a matter of when and how it came about.

Mr Brown could never possibly have been as bad as his propaganda foes claimed. The same is true now of Ed Miliband. Perhaps we could grow up a bit, and judge people by their actions rather than by reputations which are often false?

Why won't liberals kill to defend the good and gentle? They have nothing against death as such

One of the strongest arguments for hanging heinous murderers is that it is more humane than locking them up till they die. Anyone who has seen inside a prison would much prefer a quick death to wearing out his days in such a place.

I know that some people actively argue that notorious convicted killers should live in fear of attacks and perhaps a violent death at the hands of their fellow inmates.

I pity anyone with such a shrivelled conscience. The expression ‘Hanging is too good for him’ was first uttered by Mr Cruelty, an unlovely character in John Bunyan’s (alas) neglected masterpiece The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Now I read that a Belgian serial killer, Frank van den Bleeken, has won the ‘right to die’ under that country’s laws, which I suspect we will soon adopt. I don’t think he’ll be the last.

I find this quite funny. Modern liberals lack the moral courage to defend the gentle with strong laws, so won’t directly kill even the worst criminals.

But the ludicrous twaddle of ‘Human Rights’, with which they try to replace Christian morals, allows them to euthanise the people they won’t execute.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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15 September 2014 12:44 PM

Here and elsewhere some people have attacked my position on Scotland as some sort of betrayal. I can’t really see why. I am not the one who has hollowed out the Union over many decades.

Others must take the responsibility for the major changes which have pretty much destroyed Scottish Unionism (once a very powerful force, and the most powerful political trend in Scotland until the 1970s).

I would list these changes as follows:

The more or less total collapse of Calvinist Christianity is Scotland’s dominant belief.

Britain’s decision, if such it was, to abandon its post-Reformation isolation from the Roman Catholic and statist European continent – this is doubly significant, as Scotland had always (until Union) been viewed as the Continent’s easiest back door into England, a door which was bolted and barred by Union.

The demolition of Scotland’s mining and manufacturing industries ( again, in my view, a consequence of the European Union, which stopped Britain from protecting its own industries against continental competition, and which inaugurated a general slide of economic power in a Southerly and easterly direction).

Anyone who knew pre-1970 Scotland would be astonished by the place as it is now, transformed utterly from the stern, dark, workful and (very well-educated place) it was. (The destruction of the Academies -the Scottish equivalent of Grammar Schools) came at about the same time.

The loss of these facts and ideas left a great gap, and Nationalism has filled it. There are interesting reasons for that, one of them being the special fury with which deindustrialisation was visited on Scotland, the other being the attractive success of several smaller European nations especially since 1989 – when the end of the Cold War meant we no longer had to huddle together for warmth.

By the way, before we move on from this part of the argument, I’d like to mention a curious anomaly that has never caused any trouble up till now. We’re told that the Queen would have difficulty being Queen of a separate Scotland. I’m, not sure why this should be. If you look carefully at the symbols of national authority in Scotland, such as police badges and postboxes, you’ll find they have long featured the Crown of Scotland, distinctly different from the Crown of St Edward which occupies the same places in England and Wales. What’s more, when the Queen goes to church in Crathie, she is a Calvinist Presbyterian, like the rest of the Church of Scotland. When she does so at Sandringham, she is an Anglican, who is a good deal vaguer about the doctrines of predestination and the rest on which the Scottish Kirk is admirably, if sternly clear. It would be rude to as Her Majesty *how* she copes with this shifting allegiance, but she seems to manage quite well.

As I was born in Malta GC, when it was part of the Empire, first came to this country as a squalling baby, and was soon afterwards carted off to a Naval married quarter in Rosyth, near Dunfermline in Fife, my first conscious memories of these islands are very Scottish – the lovely coast of Fife, the steepled steel-grey skyline of Dunfermline itself, the ruins of the Abbey, distant prospects of the Dollar Mountains and of what I think were then the ruins of Fordell Castle against the sunset, the glories of Edinburgh, the thrilling cold of the winters, the milk frozen so hard on the doorstep that it had pushed its way out of the bottle, with the foil cap sitting on top, and the Scottish voices that to this day seem to speak of reassurance and quiet competence.

I wept when we had to leave, peering out of the sleeper at the Firth of Forth at dusk, as our southbound sleeper steamed across the great bridge which still thrills me every time I see it. There was no horrible road bridge alongside it in those days. Queensferry still *was* a ferry. I pestered my parents (who had no power over the matter, which was firmly decided by the Lords of the Admiralty) to take us back, and it took me quite a while to appreciate the different beauties of Dartmoor and the South Downs. A few years ago I was haranguing a literary festival in Edinburgh and had time to take a train across the Firth to Dunfermline and Rosyth.

Without a map, using a cat-like instinct I didn’t know I possessed, I managed to find my way to the road I had left more than 50 years before, aged four, and to the small recreation ground from which you can still see the enormous cranes of Rosyth dockyard. I felt, as one does on such journey, like a ghost.

So I might just care about it more than a lot of English people. But so what?

Well, all I ask is that those who want to contest my position accept that it is genuine. I had felt increasingly furious at the scaremongering of the ‘Yes’ campaign for some months. It seemed to me to be embarrassingly similar to the sort of tripe that I recalled from the contest over Britain joining the Euro. All that was lacking was the usual letter in the FT from some Japanese car manufacturers saying that we would all be doomed if we didn’t vote ‘yes’, but that, presumably, is because there are no Japanese car factories in Scotland.

And if this is so, then surely there is a strong argument for England taking advantage of the unintended consequence of this –namely the departure from the UK of a large chunk of the pro-EU vote. If I’m right about how well England would do outside the EU, it’s possible to envisage an Act of Reunion, perhaps 50 years hence, when Scotland tires of being a province in Germany’s liberal empire, and sees who was really to blame for so many of its post-1970 woes.

I am also pretty sure that the Tory High Command want Scotland to leave, so as to save themselves, but also know they must never admit it. I was struck that Mr Cameron said during his recent lachrymose and profane visit to Scotland that he put country before party. It would be pretty much the first time he had done this, if so - but who had accused him of doing the opposite? Oddly enough, nobody had (unless you count me), so what voice was he seeking to still by making this declaration?

I was also struck by the hilarious statement by Ruth Davidson, the interesting leader of the Scottish Tories (a hopeless rump which survives at Holyrood despite having no visible purpose, a bit as if there were a small party of Unionists in the Dublin Dail). She said that her party was most unlikely to win the next election, which is perfectly true, and what I have been saying for years. But she said it to discouraging people from voting ‘Yes’ on the grounds that voting ‘No’ might expose Scotland to another Tory government.

I cannot think of any party leader who has ever made a virtue out of the fact that her own party is unlikely to win the next general election. But full marks for candour.

Mr McMullen asks why the political class are defending the Union if they don’t love it. My article explains this quite clearly They fear that Scottish independence threatens them personally, or their parties. In fact, with bit more space, I would go further. They fear that a Scottish secession from England might finally upset the thought-free inertia which has kept these dead parties in being long after they ceased to have any real purpose. A ‘Yes’ vote on Thursday could have incalculable consequences for many settled institutions. When what seem to be settled facts turn out to be unsettled after all, even the thoughtless must think. As the Foreign office spokesman said on the day of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ‘All the isms are now wasms’.

I thought the comment which shone out in its clarity of understanding came from ‘Jonathan’. I know he took issue with me on some other aspects of the question but he grasps why scare stories won’t do as a counter to a desire for national self-determination.

What many Scots want (and, as I note and understand, what they will not get) is a goal which is so desirable that they would willingly make actual material sacrifices for it. To oppose such a cause, you must have true passions of your own, desires and beliefs for which you too might be willing to make sacrifices. The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

He wrote: ‘As an Israeli, I am baffled by the whole discussion surrounding this referendum. It seems to revolve almost exclusively around finances. I always thought that independence is about, well, being independent. If I were employing the same reasoning voters in this referendum are supposed to employ, I would have never left the spacious apartment of my parents and gone off to live on my own (in a much less nice abode).

Mr Hayes suggests ‘Perhaps the Hated Peter Hitchens is using his unpopularity with socialists to canvas for a no vote?’ He voices a thought which had certainly crossed my mind. My own purely material interest in the vote is centred on the fact that a ‘yes’ verdict might save the Tory Party, a result I’d hate, as an Englishman, a Cornishman and a British subject, in fact as a human being. But such Machiavellian ploys seldom work. One thing I am sure of, that the pleadings of English conservatives will have little effect on the decisions of Scots.

14 September 2014 12:44 AM

Actually if I were Scottish, I would be voting ‘Yes’ just to spite all the people who are trying to frighten and browbeat me into voting ‘No’. Anyone with any spirit must surely feel this way.

If ever we do get the much-promised vote on EU membership, the anti-British side will use just the same tricks and smears to scare us into staying in this miserable liberal German empire. I only hope that, if so, we will have the backbone to ignore them and vote for our independence.

Listen to it – the poor Scots are threatened with currency collapse, bankruptcy, irrelevance and isolation. There’ll even be a frontier, doubtless with barking dogs, searchlights and minefields planted with exploding haggises.

Well, what do you think we’re all going to get if we stay in the EU? The real scare story is that 40 years of EU membership and wild overspending have brought the whole UK to ruin.

The current strength of sterling is an absurdity and can’t last. George Osborne’s boom is the most irresponsible bubble since the 1970s, based entirely on ludicrously cheap housing credit.

Roughly half the containers that leave our main port at Felixstowe contain nothing but air, and quite a few of the rest are crammed with rubbish for recycling, because our real export trade has collapsed, much of it throttled by EU membership.

The incoming containers are full, of course, of cars, clothes, gadgets and food – but how are we to pay for them?

As usual, the biggest story of the week was buried – the rise in our monthly trade deficit during July to £3.3 billion. That includes the famous ‘services’ which are supposed to make up for the fact that we don’t manufacture much any more.

It is impossible to see how we can live so far beyond our means for much longer. Both Government and people are deeper in debt than ever.

So forgive me if I point out that it’s quite scary enough staying in the UK. The trouble with the ‘Better Together’ lot is that scares are all they’ve got.

None of the three party leaders – supposedly rivals, actually accomplices – truly loves the Union.

They all view it as an outdated, conservative idea and they much prefer the glinting Teutonic rule of Brussels and Berlin.

They’ve been working night and day for decades to destroy British patriotism, culture and history, and replace them with a tasteless, pasteurised multiculturalism.

Who can blame the Scots for wanting to stay Scottish rather than be processed into the same greyish puree?

But David Cameron and Nick Clegg both correctly fear a ‘Yes’ vote will cost them their jobs, which they should by rights have lost after their dire results in the Euro elections in May.

And Ed Miliband fears that a ‘Yes’ vote will destroy his party’s chances of ever winning a Westminster majority. That’s all they’re fighting for – themselves.

Having got used to the idea that Scotland may say goodbye, I’ve been thinking about possible good consequences. Setting aside the puncturing of David Cameron, one of the most over-rated figures ever to become Premier, there’s the strong possibility that, without Scotland, we will actually leave the EU.

I don’t presume to speak for the Welsh, but I am quite confident that England on her own can, if she wishes, be a happy and successful civilisation. In fact it might do us no end of good to rediscover ourselves.

But one thing we must stop doing – in fact it would be a good idea to stop it now. A nation that has trouble keeping itself together has no business bombing other nations or peoples to try to force them to do our will.

A peek at out leaders' secret past

I am pleased that a film – The Riot Club – has been made about spoiled young men who spend their time at Oxford getting drunk and wrecking things.

Three of our most senior Tory figures belonged to such a club, and don’t seem to me to have been either frank or especially apologetic about their behaviour.

On the contrary, very serious (and I would think expensive) attempts have been made by unknown persons to prevent the publication of pictures showing these future grandees in their drinking suits. One such picture has been mysteriously, if clumsily, doctored, presumably to conceal something important.

Given that the Tory Party has made such an effort to attack Ed Miliband for his inability to eat a sandwich, I think we are entitled to dwell on its leaders’ ability to get hog-whimperingly drunk in tailcoats.

Cameron's 'triumph' is Libya's disaster

More news of Mr Cameron’s neglected triumph in Libya. As he prepares to dispatch RAF jets to pound yet another desert, our modern Churchill really should boast more about the outcome of his brilliantly directed overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.

For instance, did you know that the Libyan parliament, keystone of the ‘democracy’ Mr Cameron created in Tripoli with British rockets and bombs, is now meeting in a requisitioned Greek car ferry, moored to a dockside in Tobruk? Tobruk, as some of you will remember from history, is the last stop in Libya before you get to Egypt.

It cannot, alas, meet anywhere else in Libya because the rest of the country is under the control of rampaging Islamist gangsters, and people-smugglers who daily send hundreds more refugees in leaking boats towards Italy and, eventually, Calais. The mood on board the car ferry is said to be ‘sombre’. I should think so.

If the entire Libyan parliament turns up at Tilbury on the good ship Elyros, I suggest that immigration officers direct them to the hills outside Witney, where Mr Cameron has a nice weekend home, paid for by you and me.

There, he and the Libyan MPs can wonder together where they went wrong.

A new study shows that teenagers who smoke cannabis are 60 per cent less likely to finish school or get a degree, compared with those who never touch it.

Daily users of the drug are also seven times more likely to attempt suicide than non-users.

These important facts could explain several worrying trends in our country. Yet the report was barely mentioned by most media – especially those who relentlessly plug irresponsible and wicked campaigns to destroy what’s left of our drug laws.

A survey into the past and present drug use of Left-wing media executives might explain this strange reticence. Time it was done.

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10 September 2014 1:30 PM

Before setting out one or two possibly over-optimistic predictions, I thought I would look back at some of the things I’ve said recently about the Scottish issue. Back in April, I wrote : ‘Have we yet even begun to realise what a huge change may overtake us in September if Scotland votes for independence and Britain ceases to exist? Silly threats about the pound, the economy and defence simply don't work. I hope they wouldn't work on us either. They actually increase the pro-independence vote. So why do we keep making them? I for one am sure that the High Command of the Tory Party actively wants Scotland to leave. It is the only way the Conservatives, who like office above all things, will ever get a majority at Westminster again. You don't think they are that cynical? Why ever not?’

I had written : ‘I think we have lost Scotland. I felt it the other day, a disturbing sensation like that moment when the tow-rope parts, the strain too great for its rotten, decayed fibres to bear. The sulky, puzzled feebleness of the London politicians' arguments sounds desperate and defeated. Alex Salmond has already won the September referendum. Tell the Scots they can't keep the pound, and they'll just think quietly: 'Oh, yes, we will. Try and stop us.' And just imagine the reaction in a Scottish home when a friend or a relative phones from south of the border (as urged by David Cameron) to persuade them to vote against independence. Laughter would be the kindest response.

As for the Prime Minister's threat to take the whole Cabinet to Scotland, the actual sight of this squad of third-raters and phonies on the streets of Glasgow or Stirling should make a Nationalist victory certain. What has Scotland to fear by declaring independence from this unprincipled, mumbling shambles? As it happens, I am more grieved about this approaching divorce than most Englishmen will be. My earliest childhood memories are of the lovely coast of Fife, of Scottish voices and Scottish landscapes. I even like the sound of bagpipes.

And I grew up, in a Navy family, in that bleak but cosy era soon after the war, which had brought us all together in a warm Britishness that has now evaporated. I think we belong together, are stronger together and could defy the world together if we wanted.

But this does not stop me seeing what has happened. And I am amazed that so few have noticed the real problem. The leaders of the United Kingdom cannot argue for Scotland to stay in a country they themselves are working so hard to abolish.

Mr Cameron's allegiance to the European Union (which is total and unshakeable) automatically makes him the enemy of the Union of England and Scotland.

Let me explain. The EU's purpose is to abolish the remaining great nation states, carving them up into 'regions' that will increasingly deal direct with the EU's central government in Brussels.

Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid and Rome are allowed to retain the outward signs of power. But it is a gesture. All the real decisions are already taken elsewhere, from foreign policy and trade to the collection of rubbish and the management of rivers. Under this plan, England itself will cease to exist. The European Parliament gave the game away a few years ago by publishing a map of the EU in which all the regional boundaries were shown, but the word 'England' was not mentioned. Meanwhile, the smaller nations of Europe are indulged by the EU, because (unlike the big countries) they are no threat to it. They are happy to be allowed a flag, an anthem, a well-paid political class, a little pomp and circumstance - and no real power.

Like many of the EU's smaller members, Scotland is not big or rich enough to be truly independent. It can never hope to have its own free-floating currency, or its own armed forces capable of projecting power - the true indicators of sovereignty.

In truth, 'independence' will mean that Edinburgh becomes a cold vassal of Brussels, instead of a warm friend of London.

But since London itself has surrendered so much of its power and independence to the EU, this isn't the major change it would once have been. If Scotland is going to be run from Belgium anyway, why let the power and money flow through London, rather than direct to Edinburgh? Britain has given up its own national independence and sovereignty without a struggle. It is not a proper country any more. Having betrayed our own flag, we can hardly ask the Scots to be loyal to it.’

The key part of this prophecy , apart from the rather early prediction of a ‘Yes’ vote, was this: ‘The leaders of the United Kingdom cannot argue for Scotland to stay in a country they themselves are working so hard to abolish. Mr Cameron's allegiance to the European Union (which is total and unshakeable) automatically makes him the enemy of the Union of England and Scotland.’

I stick with that – though paradoxically the current last-minute melodrama of polls actually makes a ‘Yes’ vote slightly less likely than I thought it back on the 16th February. When I wrote that, the ‘No’ campaign were serenely confident and relaxed. Now they’re neither. I suppose it’s just possible that they may yet swing it with the argument that independence is irreversible. But then again, that may well be wishful thinking. We'll all know soon enough.

Anyway, let’s look at what happens if there actually is a ‘Yes’ vote. For a start, most of the scare stories will turn out to be just that. It’s the same with the scare stories we are fed about what would happen if Britain left the EU. Just as the EU would have no rational interest in fouling up a major market and close neighbour, England would have no interest in causing an economic and political crisis in Scotland.

So we would sort out some sort of currency union, make a reasonable agreement on the debt, and use what influence we have in the EU to ensure that Scotland isn’t forced on to the ramp that leads to the Euro, or into Schengen. Since there’s no precedent for a part of an existing EU member separating from that EU member, I expect compromises can and will be found.

These - the Euro and Schengen - are in fact the major dangers, and ones we can do least about. They’ve featured only slightly because the ‘No’ campaign is full of pro-Brussels figures who don’t feel happy drawing attention to the ferocious demands the EU makes on new members. Those demands rather give away the truth about the EU’s real nature, that it is a political superstate which strangles the independence of its members, who have often been inveigled into it 'democratically' with empty and dishonest elite campaigns in which the truth ahs been carefully hidden and denied.

In fact, the whole debate about currency union has completely confirmed what I and other anti-Euro campaigners said, to hoots of derision and feigned incomprehension, back at the end of the last century. He who controls the currency controls the country. I suspect Alex Salmond is quite happy with the outward forms of independence for now, while he consolidates his position. As long as Europe remains reasonably peaceful and prosperous, a symbolic toy nation can look and feel exactly like the real thing. Scandinavia proves this all the time, its nations passing in and out of subjugation or domination by nearby powers, as circumstances change - and everyone being too polite to mention this. Even Swedish neutrality in World War Two turns out to have been a bit dubious, with German troops actually allowed to cross Swedish territory.

As with Ireland, Scotland's crucial point of separation will come much later when the issue of currency does arise – for I am quite sure that, whatever is agreed this year and next, Edinburgh will come under relentless pressure to join the Euro. If ( see below) England leaves the EU, that pressure will be huge.

But that takes us into even more fascinating territory – the future of the former UK (acronym problems will force us to think of another name for what’s left) .

And that’s the start. If Scotland goes, can Wales be far behind? And then what about Northern Ireland, whose principal Unionist connection with the UK has always been with Presbyterian Scotland, not with Anglican England?

We shall need to think in a wholly different way. What a good opportunity, by the way, to abandon plans to update the ludicrous and useless Trident ‘deterrent’ (whom does it deter, and from what?) . And to lay aside our delusions of grandeur in the Middle East and North Africa. What is lweft of 'democratic' Libya’s ‘parliament', I see, has now retreated to a Greek car ferry moored (for the moment) at Tobruk. This may soon be the last territory it controls.

WARNING: May contain traces of SARCASM: David Cameron’s genius for nation-building in the Maghreb is, if anything, even greater than his genius for nation-maintenance here at home.

England, having rather notably failed to sort out its own internal problems, would for some years to come have a built-in excuse for standing back modestly from the problems of others, and that, to me at least, would be very welcome. For many years now our pose as a major power has been absurd, even laughable. Might we lose our seat on the UN Security Council? I suspect that was bound to happen anyway. We might have to relearn, instead, the ancient art of alliances, based upon interests rather than airy principles we don’t actually believe in anyway. A tough and cynical foreign office, like those of the First Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, would flourish outside the airy platitudes of the UN.

I have to confess that, though I have attempted to defend ‘Britishness’ as an idea and a nationality for many years, and remain scornful of St George’s Day celebrations and calls for an ‘English Parliament’ (we have one already, though badly in need of reinvigoration), a part of me thrills to the return of the word ‘England’ to its old force and power. Queen Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech before the Armada, ending ‘but I have the heart and stomach of a King ….and of a King of England, too!’ always makes me want to leap to my feet and cheer. I used to know by heart John of Gaunt’s dying speech ‘…this earth, this realm, this England’, and I think I had better get round to learning it again. In recent years I’ve tended to emphasise the bits about ‘pelting farms and rotten parchment bonds’ and ‘shameful conquest of herself’ . It would be nice to have the silver sea back, serving us ‘in the office of a wall. Or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands.’

For the really exciting possibility of all this is that a newly manoeuvrable, realistic and thoughtful England might just choose the opportunity to abandon the dead political parties which have brought it to this state, and to leave the European Union – not through empty promises of rigged referenda, but through proper debate and Parliamentary majority after an election in which the issue was properly tried between articulate and honest opponents. . This is, after all, the only way we can regain control of our borders, our territorial seas, our economy, our trade, our foreign policy and our law.

And if it works (as I think it very much would) it will be very interesting to see how the other former members of the ex-United Kingdom respond to our independence. They might want to come back.

Of course it’s much more likely that the dead, nationalized parties will survive, now supported by the EBC ( a set of initials we’ll all be learning, if Mr Salmond gets his ‘Yes’) and our political elite and their tame media will instead inveigle us into balkanizing ourselves into regions, and turning our backs on hope and freedom.

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08 September 2014 4:52 PM

Very well then, let us talk about Scottish Independence. But please, let us do it thoughtfully. I really do not think that my views on this subject will influence anyone north of the border, and don’t see why they should.

Nor am I as distressed as I probably ought to be about the possibility of a Scottish secession. The main thing that annoys me about the prospect is that it might just save the Tory party from what would otherwise be unavoidable and well-deserved slow death.

In a parliament from which Scottish MPs had been removed, the Tories could win a majority, not through any merit, but simply because a large number of their opponents had vanished. It is the only way the Tories ever could win a Westminster majority again.

One has to wonder if the Tory Party’s notably feeble defence of the Union has something to do with this fact.

Anyway, back to the deep subject of the splitting of the United Kingdom:

Many years ago I was interviewed by Adam Boulton of Sky News about what was then my new (and first) book ‘The Abolition of Britain’, published after some difficulty but attracting a certain amount of attention.

Mr Boulton had at first assumed that the theme of the book was devolution, then getting under way thanks to the Blairites’ unprincipled decision to try to head off Welsh and Scottish nationalism ( growing threat to their own party) by encouraging local parliaments. That went well, didn’t it?

As it happens, I don’t think I did more than touch on the subject (I am currently recording an audio-version of ‘Abolition of Britain’, and have so far not noticed any mention of it at all).

Of course it wasn’t about that at all. Those few who have read it (rather than the hostile reviews of it from which most people have formed their opinions) will know that it’s a series of essays about how deep moral and cultural changes in Britain were achieved or came about. The links between these essays are that these changes, added together, amounted to a cultural revolution as devastating as that which convulsed China during the same period – but without the violence, and so largely unnoticed.

It is mostly unpolitical, in the party sense, though it contains some rather tinny reflections on the Euro and the approaching general election in which this was expected to be an important issue( it wasn’t , as it happened) . If I rewrote the book now, I’d remove these, as they subtract from it.

in which he reflects, generously :‘About 15 years ago people such as John Redwood and Peter Hitchens produced books called The End of Britain or The Abolition of Britain. They saw the principal threat as coming from the EU, I think; and though they were obviously right to be concerned about the erosion of sovereignty, I don’t think either of them expected the constitutional annihilation of the country. Now those book titles look prophetic, frankly.’

I can’t speak for Mr Redwood, who bafflingly remains in the Tory Party, shunted insultingly into a remote siding and cut off from any position of importance.

But I’d say that while I didn’t expect this in detail, I was pretty much prepared for anything. You see, I’d seen catastrophe in Moscow in the early 1990s, and I knew that countries can fall apart far faster than people think they can, especially countries which are, in essence, federations. Shortly before I went to work in Moscow. Boris Yeltsin began to assert the existence of Russia as distinct from the USSR. I remember talking to British diplomatic experts on the Soviet Union, and asking what the rules permitted, and how far it could go. They were unsure, and reasonably regarded my speculations about frontiers and control of law-making and armed forces as premature. So it seemed then. But not for long.

After the 1991 putsch, I watched many of my wildest speculations take solid shape with amazing speed. I recall a trip in autumn 1991 to the Estonia-Russia border between Narva and Ivangorod, a picturesque setting in which twin castles glare at each other across the water, and being able to cross the bridge between two increasingly separate countries, with minimal formalities. It seemed a bit of a joke to me and my Muscovite colleague (though the Estonians gave him – but not me – a bit of trouble on the way back) . Within a few months it had hardened into a proper guarded frontier, as had many others which had for decades been no more than a forgotten line on a map.

The departure of Ukraine, within absurd borders, was one of those wild speculations (What, we all wondered, would happen to the Crimea, so very Russian yet ‘given’ to Ukraine by Krushchev in a thoughtless gesture). And we see the consequences to this day.

As usual, in the Cassandra zone of combined prophecy and powerlessness in which I live and move and have my being, I sometimes fall victim to the desire to pronounce on what should be done about current events, and set out manifestoes and prescriptions despite having no power or influence, and no means at all to insert my ideas into the sprockets, chains and cogwheels of power.

This, I suspect, is because I resent being no more than a safety valve for other disenfranchised people, whose frustration and rage are assuaged because I express them on public platforms, and yearn to have some actual effect.

But – as I now openly recognize - all reliable indicators suggest that I am on the losing side in all major moral, cultural and political battles, and am likely to remain there until I die. My books and articles may sometimes call faintly for action, but in general they are just the last rites pronounced over the corpse of my country, muttered mainly as an act of commemoration.

If I could find a publisher now, I would try to combine all my books so far into one, under the title ‘The Obituary of Britain’.

I admit I didn’t think devolution would lead so rapidly to what we see now. It was only later that I grasped the key thing about it – that it is an aspect of the EU threat, rightly mentioned by Mr Johnson.

It was Ireland that first made me aware of the EU’s involvement in the break-up of the United Kingdom. I recall during an Irish general election in the 1980s suddenly realising that the EU provided a flag under which Dublin could become genuinely independent of London, and a flag under which a deal might be done over Northern Ireland, a deal which somehow bypassed the great wall of Unionism. But it was only a foggy apprehension. The later creation of the Euro, and all that has followed, seem to me to have made it seem sharper and more real.

About the same time, I became aware that the European Parliament had published a map (I still have a copy somewhere) of the whole EU, showing regional boundaries in every country. It had two key points of interest.

One was that, of all the countries of the UK, England was the only one subdivided into ‘regions’ with romantic, faraway names rooted in our history, such as ‘South East’. In fact, the map of England showed only these regions, though most English residents are unaware of their existence, and have the vaguest idea of which one they inhabit. The counties were of course unmentioned. The word ‘England’ did not appear anywhere on it. This truthful expression of the EU’s real attitude was later ‘corrected’ after protests. The correction was less honest than the original. Modern EU maps carry the word ‘England’, though there is in fact no such political unit, nor does the EU (or anyone else in power) ever intend there to be.

Scotland and Wales, meanwhile, were not cut up into regions at all, though in fact there are very distinct regional differences within both of them

The other was the EU recognized two separate sets of borders in Ireland. It marked the frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but it also marked (just as clearly) the four historic provinces, of Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connaught. I don’t think there was anything comparable on the map, outside the British Isles

This, taken together, looked to me like a challenge. The EU was saying that its idea of federation on this patch of soil was different from the UK’s idea. It envisaged Ireland as an island in the EU, destined to become four regions under Brussels, in which Dublin would fade into mere symbolism, a sentimental capital rather than a real one; whereas we envisaged Ireland as an island containing two distinct entities - a UK province called ‘Northern Ireland’ and an independent sovereign state called ‘the Irish Republic’.

The EU, as Sinn Fein alone has recognized, was therefore as much of a threat to genuine Irish independence as Britain.

On John Bull’s other Island, Scotland and Wales would be permitted to have sentimental symbols of nationalism – they would be called ‘Scotland’ and ‘Wales’, have capitals and flags, maybe even token armed forces and national assemblies with limited powers, and governments ( after all, Luxembourg has all these things) . But their true unsentimental status would be as regions of the EU, the equivalents of the French Aquitaine or the German Brandenburg, again owing ultimate fealty to Brussels.

When the EU used to end at the river Oder, on the bridge between Slubice and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, I recall the interesting signage as one drove Westwards. First, I think, there was blue and yellow sign saying ‘Welcome to the EU’. Then you saw a rather grand one saying ‘Welcome to Brandenburg’, and eventually a tiny little blink-and-you’ve-missed-it thing in the bushes saying rather squeakily ’Welcome to Germany’. The EU and regional signs may have been the other way round, but it doesn’t matter. It was the insignificance of the ‘Germany’ sign that I thought most interesting. The nation I was entering (using my EU passport, as the British one had been abolished) was not Germany but the EU. The province was Brandenburg. Germany was a memory, an interlude between 1870 and 1989, to be allowed to fade away in time. The sense that the end of the Cold War meant the triumph of the EU was also very strong. I think that understanding is essential to grasping recent developments in Ukraine.

for providing useful notes on US Secretary of State James Baker’s own accounts of his 1990 conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev, in which he wrote :’NATO, whose juris[diction] would not move eastward’, plus an account of a letter Baker wrote at the time to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, also saying he had offered the USSR ‘ assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its current jurisdiction’.

I have never doubted that such assurances were given. Mr Stroilov, in an effort of journalistic stretching so great it almost qualifies as Pilates Yoga, says that this can’t be right, as he cannot find any Russian records of such assurances in the Soviet records he has seen. One might suggest that perhaps they are somewhere in records he has not seen, that Mr baker would have been unlikely to have made this up and that Mikhail Gorbachev was far from the only Soviet official dealing with the USA at the time, though he may have been among the more naïve of them, as his general record shows. Mr Stroilov also manages to take seriously what is obviously a provocative Gorbachev speculation about Russia itself joining NATO, a self-evidently absurd idea which has never been remotely likely.

I am not digressing here, though I know it looks like it. The re-ordering of European frontiers is what we are talking about, and even the fate of Scotland is bound up in the same story as the Ukraine crisis, the Georgian and Moldovan border disputes, the Kosovo secession, the Cyprus partition, the splitting of the Czech republic and Slovakia and perhaps above all the break-up of what was once Yugoslavia.

Even Vladimir Putin’s attempt to impose a different federal structure on Ukraine is a sort of mirror of EU tactics. If he can make the Ukrainian provinces more autonomous and less dependent on Kiev, he can also make borders between the east and the centre more significant, so increasing Moscow’s power over the east, and over the whole of Ukraine. If he does this, which is plainly his aim, he wins twice. Not only does he enable open Russian influence in the Don basin.

He can count on such an arrangement accentuating the borders between Kiev and the far West, and so promoting strife there. This will not necessarily be hard, as the nationalist militias, now well-armed and battle-hardened, will not take kindly to being stood down by President Poroshenko, and his own official forces are weak and demoralized. There could be trouble between Kiev liberals and the (armed and angry) ultra-nationalists who trace their ancestry to Stepan Bandera and the days before 1939 when a large chunk of Ukraine was under Polish rule.

Then there’s the Yugoslav lesson. Another former federation, Yugoslavia was not very like the UK. But it had one similarity. It was a federal state on territory coveted by the EU, but a federation of a very different kind from the EU, centred on Belgrade and with some lingering connections to Moscow. If its orientation was to be changed, and a century-old German/Austrian policy desired that end, then Belgrade had to be nullified. Hence the concentration upon (undoubted) Serb atrocities and the general willingness to forget (equally undoubted) Croatian ones.

There was also the accelerated recognition of Slovenia, so as to return it to its pre-1918 German/Austrian orbit. And there was the 1992 EU recognition of independent Croatia, Roman Catholic and Romanised in faith and alphabet, loyal Habsburg subject until 1918, client of Berlin in 1941-45, invariable foe and rival of Serbia, by contrast Orthodox and Cyrillic in faith and alphabet, ally of Russia, ferocious foe of Vienna in 1914, and of Germany in 1941-45.

None of this outside interference in a former sovereign state ever seems to be counted as an attempt to alter the borders of Europe (though it certainly did) , the thing for which Russia gets into trouble in Crimea and elsewhere. For some reason abolishing borders (normally a sign of conquest) doesn’t seem to get you into the same sort of trouble as shifting them. But of course the EU, as well as advancing (democratically, of course) into many countries where it previously did not rule and abolishing the borders of all Schengen members, has also created borders between the Czech Republic and Slovakia (promptly nullified by Schengen) and between former members of the Yugoslav Federation.

Confronted with people who don’t see how important all this is, or who argue that because the local elites were bounced into rapid support of it, it’s not actually an expansion or a border revision, one is reminded of poor, dim Jemima Puddleduck, who does not suspect the Fox’s intentions towards her even when he mentions his pressing need for Sage and Onion. Those who have not read Beatrix Potter’s powerful fable of naivety versus realism are strongly advised to do so. Charm is all very well, but in the end it can be just as dangerous as naked force.

Anyway, the EU’s intentions towards the United Kingdom are, it seems to me to, encourage the secession of Scotland and Wales, and to encourage the incorporation of Northern Ireland into a four-region, EU dependent Ireland, so diminishing Great Britain and the UK, and then to (how shall I put this?) Balkanize England into ‘Regions’ which will increasingly be oriented towards Brussels and Frankfurt. The recent quiet transformation of London into a sort of presidential republic, multicultural and very separate from England, seems to me to be a key step towards this.

When the process is over, England and Britain will be no more, having no political, legal or economic significance, remembered only in Shakespeare festivals and Morris-dancing.

Without the EU’s enormous challenge to the pre-existing nations of Europe, none of this would be feasible. Alex Salmond would never have been heard of, the SNP still an eccentric gaggle of Gaelic-speaking fanatics, and there would be no referendum approaching. Without the collapse of British patriotism, Protestant, maritime, monarchist, liberty-loving in its bones, a collapse which I documented in 1999, none of this would have been even thinkable. Following that collapse, what force or ideas is there to stop it? Please don’t anybody mention an ‘English Parliament’. The worst thing about this terrible idea is that it might actually come about - some modern-architecture shed in Milton Keynes, in which the ‘regions’ of England are represented by party apparatchiks chosen from closed lists, and are allowed to debate the drainage budget and the number of windmills per hectare.

As it is, the threat of a victory for the ‘yes’ campaign may for the first time alert the people of England and Scotland to the immense scale and importance of the political revolution which has been storming and stamping across Europe from the Atlantic to the River Bug for 50 years now, and shows no sign of ending.

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27 January 2014 3:24 PM

I have argued for some time that London is the fifth state in the United Kingdom, almost completely separate from England, and more important than Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland (which is in any case a provisional (mot juste) member of the UK, its sovereignty transferable to the Irish Republic by referendum at any time).

And now we have begun to see reports that (rather predictably) there is supposed to be a ‘brain drain’ from the provinces to London, and that the supposed economic recovery (how funny that phrase will sound in three years or so) is largely limited to the capital and its surrounding satellites.

Well, I never. Actually, London has almost always dominated Britain, especially since the coming of the railways created national newspapers and national politics. It’s partly because of our compact size and our long unified history. Compare other countries such as Germany, Italy or the USA, where there are many major cities of equal standing, and the capital is (at most) first among equals) and often less than that. Even centralised France probably has more distinct provincial power bases than Britain does.

But something has happened to make the division between London and the rest much, much more important.

It’s mainly de-industrialisation, which has also affected London. My own daily journey from London to Oxford is a good illustration of this – once it took me past the AEC factory that made proper London buses, Huntley and Palmer’s Biscuits, Sutton’s Seeds and Ideal Casements in Reading (all now gone), and the coal-fired power station at Didcot, now a sort of tomb, closed by insane regulations and awaiting demolition. Or take York, where I was at university. When I arrived there in October 1970 it had a huge railway workshop, a major glass factory, and several British-owned chocolate works – but not a single chain supermarket. Travelling from Oxford (which then had an ironworks , a cake factory, a car factory and pressed steel plant, a brewery and a cattle-market, and now just assembles German cars) to York by train took me through the vast industrial zones of Birmingham, Derby and Sheffield. When I see Sheffield now I simply cannot believe the transformation, and sometimes wonder if I am imagining the great steelworks. As for the coalmines, it is astonishing how they too have disappeared as if they had never been. As for Glasgow, when I go back there now I feel like Doctor Who, returning to a place he hasn’t visited for about a thousand years. Look carefully and you will find traces of what was once there.

Instead, the City of London (again transformed by vainglorious architects) has become a huge smokeless factory turning out funny money by the ton. Even there, I can remember, back in 1977, the thrilling sight of scores of delivery vans beginning to line up in Fleet Street towards 11.00 pm, as the giant presses began to hiss and thunder deep down beneath the newspaper offices, still in all their shabby grandeur.

It makes me think back to that period in the early 1980s when ITN’s old News at Ten programme had a nightly feature on job losses and job gains. The losses, shown in red figures, were almost always factories. The gains, shown in blue figures, were almost always new supermarkets. They were exciting, unsettling times but I didn’t truly understand how much of a transformation was going on.

I think that was because by then I was living, as I did for seven bizarre years, in London. How I used to long to live there. How glad I now am that I don’t. Unbelievably, I paid rent of about £60 a month (out of a pre-tax annual salary of £5,500) on a small but perfectly pleasant top-floor flat in a late 19th century street between Finchley Road and West Hampstead, quite close to the famous Abbey Road zebra crossing. I still remember the thrill of having my own phone, with a number beginning (as they still just did in those days ) 01. Later (after some frantic saving and a family loan) I managed to find an even smaller leasehold flat in a 1930s block mainly inhabited by Austrian refugees from National Socialism, for £29,000, which meant taking out a huge loan, though by then I must have been up to more like £8,000 a year. I mention these figures because they now seem so utterly ridiculous, and bear no known relation to anything today. Like most people of my age, I gasp to think that these properties have now risen in price to such an extent that I couldn’t afford to live in them now, though I am far better–paid (in real terms as well as in raw figures)than I was then.

London has become a mad city, its centre entirely inhabited by the absurdly rich, and serviced by the absurdly poor. It isn’t quite a Third-World city, partly because so many people *work* in London who don’t live there, and trail in and out each day from commuter towns and obscure, distant suburbs, They pay the appalling fares, and endure th disagreeable conditions, because they really have no choice. (By the way, I was surprised to find the word ‘suburbs’ in the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible the other day, the 23rd Chapter of the Second Book of Kings since you ask, in a passage about the stamping out of pagan idols. I had always thought of it as a 19th-century invention).

These daytime inhabitants give London a middle class clientele, moderating the extreme divisions between the super-rich and their super-poor servants.

Also, central London still has the physical shape of a mixed city in which ordinary people actually lived. It will take a while for its new role to turn it into something more like what it really is, a super-glossy, unaffordable heart, fringed by overcrowded dormitory zones for service workers, while real life retreats outwards. What will happen if the Funny Money Factory fails, I tremble to think. Detroit may offer some lessons, but London is unique, and its decline will be unique too.

As it is, I feel a sense of crossing a frontier each morning and evening, somewhere in the wilderness between Slough and Southall. England, for all its many problems caused by de-employment, overcrowding, insane over-use of motor-cars, globalisation, commercial cloning and mass migration, is a different experience from London and feels different while you are there.

And London is also the first part of the country to have an explicitly republican form of government with a directly-elected chief executive, elevated above the common herd, and a (currently) weak and subservient legislature.

I am perpetually amazed that more people aren’t interested by this. Constitutional flux, leading first to disorientation and then to radical change, is one of the great ‘achievements’ of the Blair-Campbell government . Readers here will know that I suspect the next (2015) United Kingdom general election (if Scotland has not by then seceded) will be the last to be held under clear first-past-the post rules.

Almost every new political formation created in the last 30 years from the EU Supreme Soviet to the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies, and the weird Belgianised construct which sort-of governs Northern Ireland, has used some kind of proportional method. Oddly enough, the London Mayoralty ,alone, has taken an partly American, rather than a European direction. Even that contains a form of transferable vote if there are more than two candidates for mayor (as there always have been) , and a party list system as well as direct constituency elections for the GLA.

True, some other lesser cities have also chosen to have mayors, but they simply lack the London Mayor’s powers and status (especially powers over the police, and access to the national media).

The Mayor of London is supposed to face question time before the GLA, in theorty like PMQs, but in fact not. The session hardly ever attracts any attention. They don’t elect him. He has his own independent mandate and can ignore them if he wishes. In fact it will probably be in his interest to do so some of the time, just as Governors of US states often make their names by defying, or defining themselves against, their own legislatures. He is also a national politician, whereas they are not.

The other interesting thing is the way in which the post de-politicises its holder. Neither Ken Livingstone nor Al Johnson have much connection with the parties they nominally belong to (and Mr Livingstone was actually chucked out of his party). The Mayor of London lacks rural constituents, or many elderly ones, and is compelled to be economically and socially liberal, keen on multiculturalism, a booster for big buildings and grand projects. If he doesn’t like such things he had best not stand for the post, because there would be no point in holding it. The post holds him, rather more than the other way round, which is actually the case with an awful lot of supposedly desirable jobs.

The only significant difference between the two incumbents so far is the extent of the congestion zone in which cars are charged for entry. The other difference is that Mr Livingstone’s political career was ending when he got the job, whereas Mr Johnson’s may be just beginning. Or it may not.

Both men, being strong individuals better suited to Presidential politics, found the House of Commons (a very jealous place) hard to handle, and performed disappointingly in it. I wonder if Mr Johnson really does have that much of a future there, especially since the Tory party is (alas, too late) on the slide towards the great skip where it has long belonged.

Perhaps we shall have an enjoyable paradox, if Scotland and Northern Ireland (and surely then Wales too) leave the Union, of London doing the same, and Mr Johnson becoming (oh, irony of ironies) a major figure in the politics of the EU. What, then, of the rump of England, shorn of London and cut off by bristling frontiers from Wales and Scotland? Shall we have our capital in Milton Keynes and make ‘Sailing By’ our national anthem? Or will it be even worse than that? An independent Cornwall beckons. Time I started learning my ancestral tongue.